twitter

Monday, 30 April 2012

The New York Times yet again last week displayed a disquieting pattern of presenting dead Africans on the front page of its great newspaper, while refusing to present dead Americans in the same fashion...The disturbing photo might seem appropriate - unless one considers that the children killed by, for instance, American drone attacks in Yemen or Pakistan, never receive similar photographic display.

Saturday, 28 April 2012

"The US Labor Department has caved in to Big Agriculture and their allies in Congress to abandon the most vulnerable working children in America...Instead of protecting child farmworkers, the Labor Department will look the other way when children get crushed, suffocated, and poisoned on the job."

Friday, 20 April 2012

Saturday, 14 April 2012

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality...Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

We do know, finally, what "water-boarding" is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958:

I was taken off the bar [on which he had been hung and subjected to electric torture] and my guards started their football again [beating and kicking him], perhaps for a quarter hour. Then they led me, still naked and blindfolded, into a neighbouring room on the same floor. I heard: "We'll have to kill him, the bastard." ...dirty water and urine, probably...From time to time one of them would sit on my back and bear down on my thighs. I could hear the water I threw up fall back into the basin.

[...]

The Latin American version, called el submarino, uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks...as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, "There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe."